1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method, harvesting devices and a land-water arrangement for aqua farming. More specifically it relates to growing plants on a land mass adjacent to a body of water so that food product from the plants can be gathered from the water. The body of water may also be used to grow and harvest aquatic plants and animals. The water-harvesting devices include a watercraft food product collector, a water conveyor system, a water elevator and a harvest fluid displacement tank.
2. Background Description
As the agricultural land masses of the world available for farming become more scarce as a result of wind and water erosion and ever increasing population growth and associated urbanization, it is imperative that marginal farm land including swamps and steep hillsides be put to effective agricultural use. Current farming methods require large amounts of capital equipment and labor and typically employ large amounts of fertilizers and insecticides that may cause further problems for wildlife populations. Current mechanical methods of farming often leave bruised and battered edible plant parts. Little, if anything, has been done in agricultural technology to take advantage of the natural balance of plant and animal life in the overall relation of living things, especially the balance between aquatic and land environments.
Although a wide variety of inventions have been developed for the improvement of farming, they typically are directed toward narrow and limited features of a specific process. Seldom do they take into account the various factors that must be integrated to give a complete system of farming with a minimum of negative effects on both the ecology and the harvested food product. The following examples are indicative of the current state of the art in agricultural methodology.
Scheffler (U.S. Pat. No. 4,175,368), Billings (U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,688), Marasco (U.S. Pat. No. 3,871,040) and Rauth (U.S. Pat. No. 3,757,504) are directed at high pressure air streams used to harvest fruit from fruit trees but leave the problem of bruised and damaged fruit as a result of the impact of the fruit on the ground unanswered. Weiss (U.S. Pat. No. 1,943,152) discloses a boat that floats on a system of widely separated water channels to water a large land mass using a floating device with water pump and nozzles.
Hilble (U.S. Pat. No. 3,566,839) discloses a fishpond system for the controlled feeding and sorting of fish, but does not integrate the fish system into an overall system for growing both plants and animals in a way the plants can be harvested that minimizes damage to the food product. Dane (U.S. Pat. No. 3,139,060) teaches the use of a mobile spraying unit for spraying chemicals on bodies of water, while Evans (U.S. Pat. No. 3,523,520) discloses the use of a tractor equipped to discharge fish-feed over a large area of a pond. Mori (U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,618) combines the concepts of fish and plant production into a single system, but does so by using separate air-tight chambers for the fish and plants joined by conduits for carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide between the air-tight chambers.
Although each of these inventions teaches an aspect of plant or animal production, none of them suggest an overall system for growing plants on a land mass in a way that allows a portion of the plant (a plant part such as a fruit, e.g., apples) to be separated from the plant in a manner that allows the plant part to enter and be gathered (harvested) from a body of water, thereby reducing damage to the plant part, and reducing harvesting cost. None of the art suggests the production of both land mass plants and aquatic animals in a system of adjacent land mass and body of water. None of the art suggests the use of the body of water as a source of water for harvesting the land mass plants using a stream of high pressure water. None of the art teaches the harvesting of land mass plant parts from the water using a flotation collecting device, a conveyor system, or a water elevator. None of the art teaches a water displacement tank for the collection of food product with a minimum of damage. Prior to the present invention, all of these agricultural problems had no good, known or obvious solutions.